Tell me about British Leyland

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Discussion

alabbasi

2,470 posts

86 months

Monday 26th February 2018
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The stag is on my bucket list. Most here have been converted to either run a Chevy of Ford small block, or a Ford inline 6. If I can find a solid example that's lived in Texas all its life, I'd be all over it.

matthias73

2,883 posts

149 months

Monday 26th February 2018
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yellowjack said:
British Leyland also built this...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0opl1wdYzE

Which went into this...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjO2weDxABs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGaRHlcvBJQ


Much like the car divisions of Leyland, it was plagued all it's life by a reputation for unreliability (in my opinion not fully deserved) and was underpowered for the application, partly due to an increase in Chieftain's weight from the drawing board to prototype. I loved my time on them (1990 to about 1995) although they were a pain in the rump to maintain...
In fairness I've not come across a single tracked vehicle that doesn't chronically malfunction, including new ones.


saaby93

32,038 posts

177 months

Monday 26th February 2018
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yellowjack said:
British Leyland also built this...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0opl1wdYzE
Youtube says

'Made by British Leyland in 1973 this is the model L60 and was the Power unit for the 54 ton Chiefton tank. It's a Two stroke diesel developing 856hp at 2100 RPM. The engine weight is 2.25 tons and has 2 crankshafts one top and one bottom, 6 vertical cylinders in between each having two opposed pistons'

So its a similar engine to the one in the typhoon thread?

MuscleSaloon

1,541 posts

174 months

Monday 26th February 2018
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2xChevrons said:

Unipart - founded in 1974 from the merger of the BMC Spares and Stanpart parts divisions of the two parts of BL. Spun-off in 1987. In 2011 the actual automotive spares bit of the business was sold off to a seperate-but-also-called Unipart company which went bankrupt in 2014. The original Unipart, now a logistics and business services company, remains.
Unipart branded stuff is still knocking around from motor factors. Not sure who is behind it or maybe a large amount of old stock has surfaced somewhere.

KillianB4

150 posts

110 months

Sunday 4th March 2018
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swisstoni said:
saaby93 said:
KillianB4 said:
This is a great read, still remember the stories my dad would tell about the Marina and the Allegro his family had way back when.

His aunt bought a Mini new in the early 80s which he proceeded to roll into a ditch and she never replaced it or drove again. Although that was his fault, not BLs.

He fondly remembers the 3 wheeled Scammell lorry my grandfather used drive for British rail on Jersey in the 60s. We have a Corgi die cast of one in the same colours at home proudly displayed in the living room.
One still nearly alive
There's a very detailed youtube film about these called Scammell Scarab Mechanical Horse (!).
I was fascinated with these as a kid which is how I ended up watching the video.
Nice! I must check out that video and dig out the picture of grandad standing next to his one in 1965.

2xChevrons

3,159 posts

79 months

Sunday 4th March 2018
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Mikebentley said:
He tells me that the problems were due to two things, a workforce controlled by borderline communist union leaders and management of departments by unqualified people. He told me his head of department was a former bus driver with no qualification other than being married to the sister of a senior member of management.
There was nothing borderline about the communism of most of the union leaders. Derek Robinson was a CPGB member (and parliamentary) candidate, while most of the shop stewards at Cowley were SWP members - the ones who insisted on calling the USSR and Mao's China 'state capitalist' because they were not socialist enough.

There's nothing wrong with that, of course. It's only natural that if you believe in the principles of trade unionism and worker representation that you are, at least, going to be very sceptical about industrial capitalism and much more likely to want to dismantle the entire system.

The problem is when 'defending and representing your fellow workers against the vested interest of management' becomes 'using your job as a platform to try and tear down capitalism from the bottom up in the arena of your workplace.' That then leads to situations like (to use a non-BL) example, a shop steward at Linwood circulating a pamphlet instructing that, in accordance with the Trotskyist principles of Permanent Revolution, his members should sabotage cars that were too bourgeois. So a Hillman Imp would be OK, but a Avenger GLS risked having loose bolts left in its sill cavities or dashboard trim from the reject pile. If that destroyed the commercial viability of the factory then that was fine, because the government would (and should) take over the factory and hand it over to the workers, who would cease car manufacturing and instead build agricultural equipment which would be given free of charge to the developing world (with the wages and costs paid for by central government).

The management were no better, but in different ways. It was a problem just as endemic in British industry of the time as bolshy unions. There was no sense of modern career progression, aptitude testing, role evaluation or regular review. You moved up the chain (whether you wanted to or not) by a combination of time-served and the old boy network. Long after his stint, Michael Edwardes said that one of the first things he did when he took the helm was carry out some very standard HR studies and tests. Which revealed that something like two-thirds of BL's middle and upper management were wildly unsuitable for their jobs and about a quarter of those shouldn't have been with the company in any capacity. But he couldn't sack the majority of BL's management staff while carrying out all the other reforms he needed to do. He left that info out of his book 'Back to the Brink' because when it was published a good number of the people in question were still there!

Of course the other problem was that astute, competent people will either be poached to other firms or leave a sinking ship of their own volition. So by the end of the 1970s a lot of the talent at BL (especially in the unglamorous, put-upon but vital mid-levels) had left. When BMC had its correct but far-too-late revelation that it needed to majorly overhaul how it ran itself in the late 1960s they hired loads of management, marketing and design people from Ford (who had just been made redundant when Ford of England and Ford of Germany were merged into Ford of Europe). They did a lot of good work in a very short time period but once BL was formed it was clear that the whole enterprise was doomed and the incoming Leyland management largely ignored everything they had to say. By 1974 virtually all of the Ford contingent had left.

NDA

21,488 posts

224 months

Sunday 4th March 2018
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I remember as a teenager listening to 'Red Robbo' trying to bring down BL with continual strikes. Even back then it seemed odd that the unions wanted to put themselves out of work.

2xChevrons

3,159 posts

79 months

Sunday 4th March 2018
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NDA said:
I remember as a teenager listening to 'Red Robbo' trying to bring down BL with continual strikes. Even back then it seemed odd that the unions wanted to put themselves out of work.
The trade union movement has always been a constrast between the rank-and-file and the leadership, and that was especially acute in the 1970s. The ordinary worker just wanted job security, safe working conditions, decent pay and to be treated better than the machinery they worked with (all four of those goals were far from certain in the car industry until the 1950s and the 'cushy' pay & practise settlements were the result of decades of hard fighting against a very intransigent management). They believed in the cause of the union in so much as it gave them the means to have a respectable and secure working life.

The leadership (by the nature of people with that sort of drive putting themselves forward to be it) were much more overtly political and didn't want to just make life tolerable for their comrades within the existing system. They wanted to bring the system to an end and build up something (to their view) better, where instead of the workers having to fight to improve their lot against management, the workers would ==be== the management, and they would manage their own workplace and take a fair share of the profits of their own labour.

So the union leaders may well have believed they had the ultimate and long-term interests of their comrades at heart, but most of their members just weren't that politically invested in the struggle beyond its ability to give them a certain standard of living. And the big majority of the workers reached that point when they were no longer bringing home a steady livable wage each month because every stoppage for industrial action meant a stop of pay. The unions had their own strike-pay funds but it was less than the ordinary wage, and it's no life when you can't be sure what you'll actually be living on month to months. That precariousness is exactly what Mr. Joe Average of Longbridge signed up to the union to put a stop to!

When Michael Edwardes started his 'carrot and stick' approach he made it clear that there would be no more perpetual life-support from central government and that the days of keeping people in employment for its own sake were over. In that political environment there had to be change at BL - it had to shed jobs and the jobs that stayed had to have different practices and standards. Factories that played ball got redundancy payments, large-scale investment and a secure future. Those that resisted reform in the belief that an (at the time) Labour government would never sanction the closure of a large car factory, had a rude awakening and the loss of every single job rather than just a minority on good terms. Which is what happened at Speke.

So, with the sudden and total closure of Speke ringing in their ears, the Longbridge workers were well aware that the socialist utopia was not going to happen any time soon and that instead following Robinson to the barricades was just going to lead to all of them losing their jobs completely. Which is why when Robinson was sacked and the shop steward's committee balloted for strike to get him reinstated, the workforce refused the call by 14,000 to 600 votes.

And even that doesn't tell the whole story. Robinson was (believe it or not) something of a moderate - his rhetoric or policies never reached the levels of his comrades at Cowley (or the Linwood shop steward I mentioned previously). He was a supporter of Tony Benn's ideas for worker representation committees having a role in management. But many of his fellow conveners and more hard-line members saw that as betrayal (remember, the aim was for the union to ==be== management, not to work with it). This being a time when wildcat strikes were legal, Robinson was often in the strange position of having his members strike against him and his proposals. Around 40% of the walk-outs that Robinson is slated as having 'caused' were in fact strikes against him, rather than him leading the workers out.

This isn't the place to start discussing whether the curbing of union power has gone too far or not since the early 1980s, but the greater democracy and consensus now required within unions themselves is, surely, an indisputable improvement on this sort of mess.

Dr Jekyll

23,820 posts

260 months

Sunday 4th March 2018
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2xChevrons said:
Michael Edwardes said that one of the first things he did when he took the helm was carry out some very standard HR studies and tests. Which revealed that something like two-thirds of BL's middle and upper management were wildly unsuitable for their jobs and about a quarter of those shouldn't have been with the company in any capacity. But he couldn't sack the majority of BL's management staff while carrying out all the other reforms he needed to do. He left that info out of his book 'Back to the Brink' because when it was published a good number of the people in question were still there!

In the same book he drops a heavy hint that MI5 were providing him with details of discussion between union leaders. Wherever he got the information from which it was perfectly clear that the union leaders aim was to bring the entire enterprise down in the hope that the subsequent increase in unemployment would provoke civil unrest.

2xChevrons

3,159 posts

79 months

Sunday 4th March 2018
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Dr Jekyll said:
In the same book he drops a heavy hint that MI5 were providing him with details of discussion between union leaders. Wherever he got the information from which it was perfectly clear that the union leaders aim was to bring the entire enterprise down in the hope that the subsequent increase in unemployment would provoke civil unrest.
And that was confirmed beyond 'heavy hinting' in later years. MI5 had also been placing agents within the major unions at Longbridge to help the "hang on, lads, if we listen to Derek then Edwardes will just sack as all!" thought process along.

I don't think any of the union leaders were that secretive about it. A lot of them were self-proclaimed militants that saw themselves in the vanguard of the labour movement, and accelerationism was a big part of the ideology they subscribed to. Mass unemployment in the Midlands would certainly chivvy up the rank-and-file who only cared about having a steady job (because they wouldn't have one now!) and the unrest would be the starting point of a national revolution to set up a democratic socialist state. It's pretty textbook stuff.

NDA

21,488 posts

224 months

Sunday 4th March 2018
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Very interesting and knowledgeable insights 2xChevrons. Thank you.

Olivera

7,068 posts

238 months

Sunday 4th March 2018
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Really good stuff 2xChevrons, PH should have have you write an article on the subject!

aaron_2000

Original Poster:

5,407 posts

82 months

Monday 5th March 2018
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Olivera said:
Really good stuff 2xChevrons, PH should have have you write an article on the subject!
+1

mikal83

5,340 posts

251 months

Monday 5th March 2018
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NDA said:
I remember as a teenager listening to 'Red Robbo' trying to bring down BL with continual strikes. Even back then it seemed odd that the unions wanted to put themselves out of work.
So they would be sacked and then draw the dole for doing nothing

AppleJuice

2,154 posts

84 months

Tuesday 6th March 2018
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rockin said:
The bottom line is that it was all going OK until some idiot kicked Honda in the nuts. Game over.

IIRC Triumph Acclaim was the first "BL Honda" closely followed by "Rover 800". Both absolutely fine. Then they "went it alone" and ended up with tat like a Mustang V8 in a Rover 800 and the absolutely unforgiveable CityRover. Meanwhile Honda has developed its own large and very successful factory in Swindon.
Which Rover 800 had a Ford V8?

Brynjaminjones

120 posts

122 months

Tuesday 6th March 2018
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AppleJuice said:
Which Rover 800 had a Ford V8?
I was guessing he meant the 75?

LandRoverManiac

402 posts

91 months

Tuesday 6th March 2018
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Brynjaminjones said:
I was guessing he meant the 75?
I hope not.

I am biased (MG ZT owner) but the 75 was probably one of the best built things Rover managed to put out latterly - probably thanks to no small BMW input admittedly - but still an example of what they could do when they set their minds to it. The V8 version was genuinely interesting at the time - since not many cars can claim to have both north-south / transverse layouts and FWD / RWD versions of the same model.

Had Rover pumped out more cars built to the same quality as the 75 much earlier they might not have sunk in the way that they did.

That principle of course could easily apply to most of BL - too little too late.

morgrp

4,128 posts

197 months

Wednesday 7th March 2018
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LandRoverManiac said:
Brynjaminjones said:
I was guessing he meant the 75?
I hope not.

I am biased (MG ZT owner) but the 75 was probably one of the best built things Rover managed to put out latterly - probably thanks to no small BMW input admittedly - but still an example of what they could do when they set their minds to it. The V8 version was genuinely interesting at the time - since not many cars can claim to have both north-south / transverse layouts and FWD / RWD versions of the same model.

Had Rover pumped out more cars built to the same quality as the 75 much earlier they might not have sunk in the way that they did.

That principle of course could easily apply to most of BL - too little too late.
See to me the principle reason the 75 failed was not because of it's engineering but because of the ridiculous identity they gave it.
The whole wood and leather, retro, british thing was a complete mistake. Granted the MG models tried to redress this problem but it was a sticking plaster on an already wrecked brand image.
Frankly, looking at how fresh and modern some of their concept cars were Rover were idiots for going down the retro route with the 75 given their heritage was one of very modern often advanced vehicles - see the Rover P6 and SD1 etc.
You may hate him, but Jeremy Clarkson summed it up well by saying "putting these traditional British retro cream dials and all this wood in a Rover is the same as fitting an Onion Holder to the Dash of a Renault because it's French"
The 75 was a German interpretation of what they thought Britain was all about. It really should have been a viable contender for the BMW 3 series but lets be honest, BMW were never going to let that happen were they?

Chris1255

203 posts

110 months

Wednesday 7th March 2018
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The original design for the 200/25 had no chrome as they were consciously trying to appeal to a younger market & get away from the 'old man' image. The chrome grill was apparently added at BMW's insistence.

It's as if they never thought through how they were going to position Rover in the market, particularly with as little overlap with BMW as possible, until they'd bought the company. And then when they finally did 'lots of chrome' was all they could think of.

Wozy68

5,387 posts

169 months

Friday 9th March 2018
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A fella I work with used to be a professional photographer back in the Seventies and Eighties.

He accepted a commission where he had to go up to the West Midlands and photograph a piece of machinery being used that had just been installed in a Leyland factory. This was around the mid late Sevrnties.

He arrived at the gate, car laden with photography gear. That was as far as his car was going to get, as the gateman point blank refused to allow his foreign made car in to the site. (I believe it was an Opel).

So there he is, car parked outside this massive place unable to move his large amount of kit.

He sees a trolly just inside the gates, grabs it and starts loading his kit on to it. The gateman comes over and tells him under no circumstances is he to push the trolly into the works as that’s a trollymans job, so he waits 30 minutes for a guy to turn up and eventually off they go to find the new machine he's there to photograph.

Finally finding the machine, he asks the guy using it if it was all ok to photograph it. Sets up his camera and whilst the machine is working starts taking photographs.

After about five minutes, a shop floor worker comes over and asks what he’s doing, he explains everything to him and off the fella goes.

Five minutes after that, the union shop steward and his underlings turns up and demands he stops photographing the machine. My mate informed them what he was doing, that he had all the right permissions to do so and that the photographs were purely for a sales brochure.

They didn’t believe a word of it, thinking it’s some kind of management dirty tricks, time and motion study.

Off they go, within five minutes senior management are on the shop floor demanding he pack all his gear away and vacate the factory immediately.

Because of him just trying to photograph a British built machine in a British factory, the shop steward threatened to call a strike if he carried on, so he had to leave.